Ridgeway type from Dallas, Texas. Those guys are legion. They’re the ones who buy fakes and spend big bucks on overpriced paintings. They’re extremely wealthy chumps who see art as a way to establish their bona fides in society. So that was me, some asshole who’s got more money than sense.”
The meeting with the crooks was set for the Savoy, a grand old hotel on the Strand, overlooking the Thames. Ideally, the thieves would produce the painting, Hill would hand over a ransom, and a gang of cops would burst from hiding to make the arrests.
Farr was thrilled with his insider’s peek at all the planning and deception. Hill and Farr walked into Hill’s hotel room—a large and handsome suite, with a river view—and Hill started yelling almost at once. He’d been in a foul mood all day Hill was a big-picture thinker, not a detail man, he liked to say, but sometimes details did catch his eye. The police had showed up earlier in the day with the ransom money, ?100,000 in ?20 notes, stuffed in “a crappy police cardboard kind of thing.” Any crook would immediately start wondering what kind of high-roller he was dealing with. Hill insisted the police buy him a proper leather bag. Hill had won that battle, but his superiors had been horrified at the cost of a leather case intended as a one-time prop.
Now, in the suite, he saw at once that the carpet had been tamped down by the cops in the surveillance team. Size 12 footprints were everywhere, because the cops had been stuffing wires down every crevice they could find. “It looks like the Serengeti after the gnus have gone thundering past,” Hill complained to Farr.
Hill called for the cops. “Get somebody in here to get rid of these fucking footprints,” he shouted. “Those guys are going to come in here and see that, and then we’re all fucked!”
Once the telltale footprints had been vacuumed away, Hill relaxed. He picked up the phone and ordered a bottle of champagne and a tray of smoked salmon sandwiches. Farr scanned the room to decide which sofa would be the best to hide behind, if anyone started shooting. (“Now, dear,” his wife had told him that morning, “don’t come home perforated.”) In the meantime, he rehearsed his assigned line time after time. “This is what we’re after,” Farr was to shout, and on that signal the cops in the next room would rush in.
Hill asked Farr if he had ever seen ?100,000 in cash.
“No, let’s have a look.”
Hill unlatched his new case, which burst open, spilling money everywhere. The maid knocked on the door, with the smoked salmon. “And Charles Hill and I were sitting on this bloody briefcase,” Farr says, “trying to squash it flat.”
“The whole thing was marvelous,” Farr bubbles. “Hill was totally convincing. He dressed elegantly, not flashily, but he
Bullies like the one Hill was playing were new in Farr’s experience. He himself was fond of expressions seldom heard outside a boy’s adventure magazine of the type popular three-quarters of a century ago—his stories are full of “blighters” and “frightful chaps” and even “four-flushing swine”—and he watched Hill’s performance goggle-eyed.
Years later, he could still recite many of the exotically ugly phrases Hill had thrown around so casually. “I remember, he leaned over and tapped the case with the marked bills and said. ‘This money will stick to ‘em like dog shit,’ “Farr says gleefully. The line holds such appeal that he tries it a second time, like a mischievous schoolboy reading aloud a smutty scribble on the wall.
“Charles Hill knew just how to play a big, swaggering, loudmouthed American, if I may say that, saving your grace,” Farr says. “‘I can’t waste my time with this, I’m off to Europe tomorrow, I’ve got business all over the world, I can’t be dealing with little twits like you.’ “
Farr frets that his cultured accent drains this “good, coarse stuff” of virtually all its menace, but he replays his favorite lines nonetheless. “I’ve had it about up to here with your horseshit,” he growls, mimicking Hill.
Though Farr didn’t know it, that seemingly offhand line was far from casual. The key was the word “horseshit.” It is an Americanism, first of all, and reinforced Hill’s American persona. In the taxonomy of nonsense, “bullshit” is universal, but “horseshit” is unique to America. Second, the
At the Savoy, Hill abused the thieves for the better part of an hour and then threw them out, even though he had yet to see the stolen Bruegel. Dick Ellis was hidden in a hotel room next door, eavesdropping as the tape recorders whirred.
Even Ellis and his fellow cops, as experienced with scenes like this as Farr was new to them, feared Hill had overdone it. “We were saying, ‘Charley, steady down. We’re gonna lose these guys.’ “
“He said, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be back,’ “Ellis recalled.
“And he was absolutely right. They came back. They came back, they got arrested, and they got convicted.”
28
A Crook’s Tale
Hill’s confidence in his ability to read crooks is a product of endless hours listening to their tales. Many are hard to draw out. Not David Duddin. A flamboyant, 300-pound crook who once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt, Duddin recounts past misdeeds with the relish of a retired athlete recalling the first time he heard a delirious crowd shout his name.
The world that Hill navigates is replete with treacherous but useful characters like Duddin. Hill and Duddin go back several years; they met when Hill visited Duddin in prison, after the Rembrandt deal had gone bad. Hill hadn’t been involved in catching Duddin, but he hoped to cultivate him as a source.
Duddin lies with gusto and without scruple, for the sheer style of it. Convivial and self-absorbed, he talks freely about crime and crooks, with only the most perfunctory nods toward conventional morality. It’s all a bit of a lark. Where’s the harm?
One of his favorite roles is tour guide to the underworld. “I’ll let you make up your own mind how criminally minded you think I am,” he begins. “I don’t particularly think I
This seeming confession is in fact closer to a boastful dig in the ribs, an invitation to share in the joke. “Who are you going to believe,” the tone implies, “me or some judge?” In Duddin’s world, the fundamentals of morality— tell the truth, keep your promises, pay your debts, and so on—are not rules to live by but a credo for suckers. To earn your living by the sweat of your brow is to proclaim yourself a sap.
Duddin is no sap. Straight society is something to plunder, not to join. He explains matter-of-factly, for example, that although art is always easy to steal, stealing from Britain’s grand and stately homes (like Russborough House) is easiest of all. The homes are colossally expensive to keep up, and many of the owners have decided that their only chance of survival is to open up to ticket-buying visitors. “Picture your own house,” Duddin says. “Would you take several thousand people around it, and then think it was secure? You wouldn’t, would you?
“I’ve spoken with people—and bear in mind that where I’ve been, I’ve been with some of the heavier criminals in the country—and they say, ‘If somebody’s going to show you something and tell you it’s worth millions, well, then, you’re going to take it.’
“It’s natural. It’s normal. It’s redistribution of wealth.” This last grand phrase is a mocking joke, and Duddin rolls the words around his mouth voluptuously, savoring the syllables.
Massive and slow-moving, with arms like hams, Duddin is a great Buddha of a man, albeit a Buddha who favors such touches as gold Rolexes and bright red jackets and gleaming red shoes to match. His criminal ambition was as outsized as the man himself. At his peak, Duddin drove a Rolls-Royce (“a Roller”) and gave his wife a BMW as a Christmas present. The judge who sent him away for selling the Rembrandt and a host of other stolen treasures said Duddin was the biggest handler of stolen goods in England and dubbed him “Mr. Big.”
In his early days, Duddin ran a jewelry business. The illegal buying and selling took place in a back room. Duddin presided from behind a large, nearly bare desk. Neatly arrayed atop the desk were a scale and an eyepiece,
